Dispatches From Otherworld

Monday, February 19, 2018

It
had been too fucking long. Richard Airbright had lost patience and decided that
it was now time for him to assess matters directly.

The
whole point of binding such a foul and spiteful creature to his service was
that he could hang back and keep a low profile, focusing on the protection of
his daughter.

The
RAS could hang for all he cared. Thall had sent his “femme fatale” to provoke
Richard, and the latter believed he had been clever in sending his familiar in
response. It had been reckless and foolish and it was time for him abort the
mission.

The
townhouse was a cobweb of protective wards. He had even consented to instruct
Isabelle in the basics of their workings so that she would know if something
were amiss.

Meanwhile,
the killings had slowed, but not stopped. Most prominently, Sir Roderick Candel
had been slain in something that looked like a botched job – forensics had had
a difficult time piecing together the sequence of events from the mangled
wreckage of the cab and the two corpses. Only after about a week of
investigation did they seem to discover that half the driver’s head had been
sheered off by what any halfway decent arcanist could easily identify as a frostfire
bolt. There were no runes surrounding the body. Presumably the ritual that
Candel would fuel would have been performed post-mortem and the old bastard had
attempted self-defense (pity he had been on such a high road at the time.)

There
was an article about some foreign spy being discovered at the Rookery the same
day – just another sign of how chaotic things had been lately (he had even seen
something about a string of violent incidents in Arizradna, of all places.) He
had spent enough time reading newspapers and so he began tweaking his summoning
spell.

Whispering
Jim was bound to him: bound to obey, but also bound in the sense that they
shared a connection – one that Richard knew would be difficult for even him to
break. And so the fact that Jim had not come when called after Richard had
tired of what he was beginning to feel would be a fruitless task gave the old
warlock pause. Now, days later, Richard had begun toying with the nature of his
spells, not yet willing to imagine the nightmare scenario: that Jim had somehow
escaped his binding and gone on to sow murder and mayhem across Ravenfort, as
was his wont.

He
had invested months in securing Jim as an asset. He imagined this Clara woman
had been Thall’s in one night. Despite himself, he had almost enjoyed their
verbal sparring session, at least until she saw Isabelle. He was amused at the
time that Thall thought a pretty face would set him off balance, and yet that
was exactly what she had done, though not with her looks. There was a part of Richard
that looked forward to performing violent acts on the young woman for shaking
his sense of paternal security. The thought disturbed him, though. She was,
after all, not that much older than Isabelle. And violence toward women had
always left an especially bitter taste in his mouth - call it sexist if you
cared to. After seeing what Thall had done to Chloe after he transformed, the
specific and pointed cruelty toward the person who had been kindest and warmest
to him, Richard could not help but feel that in even the direst circumstances,
a man should reserve some degree of practical mercy for his female enemies.

He
would kill her if he had to. But he would make it quick and easy. Indeed,
whenever violence was called for, that was his general policy. But for Clara,
he would not allow Whispering Jim to tear her apart like those people at the
law office in Wolfsmouth.

“Dad,
do you need help?” Isabelle had come downstairs. She was getting another cup of
chamomile, dressed in her pajamas.

“No,
thank you, dear,” he said. The less she was involved in demonic summoning the
better. He also doubted that she could understand the complexity of the spells
he was performing, given that he barely understood them, so customized and
twisted they were.

“Is
it Jim? Is there something wrong?”

“Nothing,
dear. I just need to concentrate.”

Isabelle
watched him as his hands went through the motions. Richard’s beard began to
itch. Isabelle took a step forward. “Dad?”

“Isabelle,
give me a moment, please!” he said, catching himself before he could raise his
voice.

“I
only think… You’ve got some tangled arc-lines, between your left ring finger
and your right thumb.”

He
looked down. Indeed, the configuration of his hands had been in error. He had
lowered his right thumb in order to push the range of the spell outward, but
that had interrupted a gesture that searched for altered demonic frequencies in
the right hand. He corrected his gesture and not only did the magical energy
feel more solid, his hands also felt less cramped.

“Bell,
when did you learn about that?”

“Just
watching you for the past few days.”

Damn, he thought. The child has talent. Now, of course she did. She was an Airbright.
But his nonmagical ambitions for her seemed to be gradually disappearing off in
the distance.

And
then he felt a tug. It was not that much unlike fishing (or so he imagined,
having never gone fishing himself,) and it seemed he had caught a big one. He
continued to make the gestures, whispering an incantation to draw on latent
energies nearby to boost the signal, as it were.

THUMP.

“What
the hell was that?” Isabelle exclaimed. It had come from upstairs.

Certainly
not Jim. Whispering Jim was, after all, a being made of magical smoke, and did
not tend to thump.

Shit! thought Richard. In all of his
experimentation to summon Jim had he inadvertently summoned some other demon?
He was not prepared for a binding, and he was not eager to slug it out with
some infernal monstrosity in his own living room.

THUMP.

This
time it had come from the neighbor’s house. That did not bode well. Just what
in the hell had he summoned? Richard began to think back through the, in
retrospect, insane number of rituals he had performed in the last three days,
desperately hoping that there was no careless mention of Sadafeth, who had
given him nightmares when he was a small child (he had not repeated his
father’s mistake of training children in demonology before they had stopped
wetting the bed.)

THUMP.

This
one was very close. In fact, it seemed to have come from the front walk.

“Isabelle,
did you lock the door when you came home from school?”

He
glanced back to catch a slow, guilty shrug from his daughter.

Before
he could perform a quick telekinetic snap on the door lock, the door was
opening.

And
standing before them was Sweet Clara.

Before
he even knew what he was doing, balls of dark purple flame were forming in his
hands. His mind began rattling off which wards would protect against this
woman, a woman he had been so sure was a simple, mundane human being, but now…

“Uh…”
said Sweet Clara. “Sorry, this isn’t what it looks like.”

Richard’s
heart was pounding and he could feel his entire body grow hot (not from the
nightfire in his hands, which consumed but did not generate heat.) “Tell me one
good reason I should not burn you alive right this moment,” he said,
immediately wishing that he had told Isabelle to avert her eyes.

And
then Sweet Clara opened her mouth, but it wasn’t her voice that came out.
“Because it’s me, master,” said Whispering Jim. And then Sweet Clara (or was it
Whispering Jim?) smiled widely and held out both hands as if she had just
performed a magic trick. “You rang?”

Thursday, September 28, 2017

The
time that had passed was abstract. True to the style of the House, the torture
was not physical, but a forced disorientation. The last span of darkness, he
was sure, had lasted over forty-eight hours. But how long it was beyond that he
had no way of knowing. He had been stripped of his clothes other than his
underwear, which was rank with the smell of sweat and had gone from a clean
white to a filthy tan. There was actually a little toilet – one of those
portable devices a person can put on a yacht that isn’t attached to any
plumbing, but sequesters away waste until it can be extracted and disposed of.
There was a bottle of hand sanitizer that they provided him with, though it
wasn’t enough that swallowing it would put him beyond their reach.

The
room had a concrete floor and a large glass window facing outward onto what
seemed like a dark garage or bunker – a space wide enough to accommodate a pair
of large trucks and was featureless save for a few light bulbs that were bare
except for simple plastic cages. He could not see the end of that space to the
left of his cell, but the cell’s right wall was shared with the back of the
room. The glass wall between his cell and the open space seemed to be a couple
inches thick, but was manufactured precisely so that it would not distort
subjects on the other side.

His
own cell was about seven or eight feet wide and maybe twelve feet deep. There
was a door in the back wall that they would use to access him when it came time
to inject him with psychotropic drugs. He could only theorize that this was
accomplished while he was asleep or somehow sedated by an invisible gas, as he
could not remember seeing anyone come in the door nor remember receiving
injections, but his arm was covered with little spots where the needle had
clearly gone in, and the mind-warping experience of the drugs spoke for
themselves.

He
had come, in his less lucid periods, to doubt the existence of gravity. He had
a very specific memory of sitting on the wall, with his back to the ceiling,
bawling his eyes out over an obscure line of poetry that, in a dream-logic sort
of way, he could not remember. There was a line from this poem – a poem of
which, in his right mind, if such a thing existed, he had never heard – that
chronicled irony and arrogance:

“Look
on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

He
was consumed, in that moment, and thereafter as if experiencing aftershocks of
an earthquake, with an unsettling note of horror: had the engraver, or the king
he claimed to quote, known of his fate, and left those words not as a boast but
as a warning?

The
House was dying. Or rather, the House was mutating, evolving into something mad
and cruel and, the man who was variously called James Tarson and Chris Thatch
and Four Eyes feared, self-destructive. The House was meant to emerge as a new
god built of people, rational, immortal, and eternal. Yet here were those who
would have it become some writhing mass of destruction, destined to burn out
its host and thus perish along with it like a cancerous growth.

When
the lights came back on, it was usually Question Time. A tall, handsome black
man, about fifty years old, would pull up a metal folding chair and sit down.
He was dressed in a cheap, moth-eaten suit that seemed utterly wrong on him. This
was a man who was clean-shaven without a hint of stubble and looked as if he
had his hair cut on a weekly basis, with a perfect fade and flat-top that never
seemed uneven. He was the only human face that Four Eyes had seen since he was
captured, and he found him beautiful, and that just made the suit feel all the
more wrong.

Mr.
Cheap, as he had come to think of him, popped open the document case that
doubled as a clipboard. He seemed to review his notes for a solid twenty
minutes before he spoke, and Four Eyes had gotten in the habit of waiting in
silence rather than fruitlessly attempt to engage his captor.

Making
a little note, Mr. Cheap finally looked up. “Four Eyes, I hate to be the one to
tell you this, but Six Coins is dead.”

Four
Eyes took a moment to process this. Could be a lie, meant to make him feel less
on solid ground, or it could be true. Four Eyes decided he would try not to let
the information change his behavior.

“When did he recruit you?”

Four
Eyes remained silent. He knew better than to offer up information without any
incentive.

“Fair
enough,” said Mr. Cheap. “Orville Sacker, thirty-three years old. Born in Kelmar,
Omlos Province to Mayla Proudley, born Sacker. Half-sister Jaina Proudley. You
attended Aligheri University, graduated with honors age 21, worked at Reben
Arts Endowment before dropping off the map at age 25. We assume that’s when you
were recruited, but I’d appreciate it if you could confirm.”

Four
Eyes had to fight not to wince. Yes, Orville Sacker had become just one of many
identities for him, and he had long ago accepted the possibility that threats
could be made against his family in a situation like this, but it was never
enjoyable to see such a hypothetical see realization.

He
hadn’t spoken to his mother or his sister in a long time. He had not faked his
death, as some Agents were known to do when they entered the House. It had
never really bothered him to think that they might be concerned with him. The
House had not chosen them, and that meant that, ultimately, they were not all
that important. The House had a way of detecting remarkable people and bringing
them into the fold. He had a general sense that he would prefer these two women
to live comfortable and happy lives – he did not feel any resentment toward
them – but again, it did not concern him terribly.

What
did concern him was that he was having trouble imagining a scenario in which he
walked out of this cell alive. It
was possible they had taken him out of fear that he might reveal something he
knew about the House. A panicked thought shot through his mind that it was his
own faction that had captured him. But if they wanted him dead, that would have
happened a long time ago.

“You
haven’t killed me yet. So I have something you want.”

“That’s
an interesting theory.”

Four
Eyes smirked. “Right, so there’s nothing you want me to tell you? I’ve got to
be costing you a thousand tolls a day at least, with all the drugs you’re
putting in my system. So clearly I’m worth something to you.”

“Not
to us, no.”

Ok… thought Four Eyes. Don’t let them know you’re confused.

“To
be honest, Mr. Sacker, my main purpose here is to keep you engaged and focused.
I’m here to keep your mind from fraying on the edges. Do you know what
prolonged isolation can do to a person’s mind? It can lead to intense
depression, self-destructive behavior, and even hallucinations.”

“The
drugs seem to be taking care of the hallucinations just fine.”

“Drugs?”
Mr. Cheap made a note on his pad. “What drugs?”

Four
Eyes chuckled. “Ok, look, if you’re going to fuck with me, I’d appreciate it if
you put in a little more effort, I mean, look at the tracks on…” and with that,
he looked down at his arm. All the pinpricks were gone.

“What
makes you think I’m fucking with you, Mr. Sacker?”

“That…
uh…” Four Eyes backed away. The lights in the outer room were blinking off one
by one. “Where am I?”

“You
don’t need to know, Mr. Sacker.”

And
with that, the whole outer room went dark, and Four Eyes could not see anything
but his own reflection in the thick glass.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

They had been
playing the music a little softer in Laren’s these past few months. There was a
time, not so long ago actually, though it felt like the distant past, when
Laren’s had been noisy. In the first decades after it was founded, Laren’s had a reputation as the
toughest bar in Port O’James. Law enforcement officers were almost as regular
as the customers.

This was around the
time the Industrial Stimulus Act, called ISA, passed in Port Sang thirty years
earlier. The government invested in modernization, automating a lot of the
harbor’s services while promoting new industries and services. Port O’James was
still a port town first and foremost, but there was a growing tech industry
thanks to ISA’s tax incentives and education investment.

This allowed Port
O’James to escape from an economic slump, but it also created a gigantic rift
between generations, with a lot of resentment toward the “ISA Kids” on the part
of those who were a generation or half a generation older. Children descended
from long lines of longshoremen and sailors now had access to world-class
educations and white-collar careers.

Laren’s became
something of a battleground in the resultant culture war. But over time, the
old regulars started to give way to new regulars, and the rough reputation
transformed into a charm in its own right. The rambunctious fervor of the bar
metamorphosed into an ironic imitation of itself.

But the volume of
sound, ironic or not, had died down in recent months. And so when Ana walked
into her favorite bar, there was something dreamlike to it - an incongruity
that, at least in her current state of consciousness (something she was pretty
certain was genuine wakefulness,) refused to be contradicted.

There was no denying
that if people recognized her on the street, they tended to either stare or
avert their gaze. She had never felt so self-conscious, but after weeks of this
treatment, she thought she had gotten used to it.

Walking in to see a
quiet Laren’s, though, confirmed for her something that until this point she
had only understood subconsciously. It was not just her. The city was on edge.

And to be fair, it
had felt on edge since the Ostrich sailed
into port. But in the time that Ana had been gone, the town had gotten
skittish.

She thought about
the faceless men, and how the soldiers at Far Watch had behaved strangely,
unable to see them. She took some consolation that she had not seen any of the
faceless men since Far Watch, and she preferred a town that was scared over one
filled with people numb to near catatonia.

Nick and George were
at a table in the back – not their usual one, as there was a group of Arizi
sailors taking that spot. For an instant, she considered turning around before her
friends saw her, but her feet kept taking her forward.

“There she is!”
cried George. He got up from the booth and immediately went over to hug her.
Ana bent down to accept the hug – George had achondroplasia, and so was over a
foot shorter than she was. George wrapped his arms around her and held tight.
Her eyes began to well up. George whispered into her ear “You’re back, Ana. And
we’re never letting them take you away again.”

Ana released a
sobbing guffaw. “Thank you,” was all she could think to say. They had been
friends since elementary school. When things got heated with her parents, Ana
would stay at George’s house. One hug brought back almost two decades of
friendship. It was a little overwhelming.

Ana stood up again
when Nick came to hug her. This was a quicker moment, one-armed due to a glass
of beer in his hand. And there was the awkwardness inherent both in the fact
that they had seen one another fairly recently at the station and the perpetual
subtext of his hopeless infatuation with her. It had been her hope that, if
there was any good to come of her shocking revelation as undead, that he might
finally lose this attraction, but she suspected that he had not.

That was not a
problem she felt ready to confront – it was low on her priority list.

“So,” began Nick.
“How’s the process coming?”

“Fully debriefed.
Legally recognized as the same citizen I always was.”

“And at work?” asked
George.

“Taking a leave of
absence. Harrick suggested it.”

“To cover himself?”
George has always been skeptical of law enforcement, and Ana’s choice to join
the force had been met with something like shock – though the shock was couched
in unconditional support, as it always had been with George. Ana had chosen the
career partially because of her grandfather, Bjorn, who had always been her
favorite. He had died early enough that she was able to idealize him and ignore
the likelihood that he would have held to the same conservative views that had
alienated her from her mother. On principle, she also decided that if she
wanted a society with a more progressive and ethical law enforcement, people
like her would have to join. Max Herrick had confirmed for her that she wasn’t
the first person to have this idea.

Ana shook her head.
“He didn’t pressure me into it or anything. I… It’s still kind of a blur to me,
you know?” She allowed a server to place a beer that one of her friends had
apparently ordered for her in front of her. “I mean, objectively, I’m not back
to normal. In a sense I’ve never been normal, you know?”

“Sure, sure,” said
George. It had sounded like he was going to follow this up with something, but
instead he turned his attention to the bottom of his nearly-empty glass.

Nick leaned forward.
“After I got suspended, George took point on trying to get you back.”

“I kept trying to
get that Lisenrush fascist’s office, but-“

“What?”

“Lisenrush, I was
trying to get in touch with her to complain. I was beginning to think they were
ignoring me.”

Ana’s own attitude
toward Lisenrush had been fairly confrontational to begin with, but after their
trek through the forest, she did not seem like an enemy.

Yet Lisenrush had
been the one to take her against her will to Far Watch. That had been dubiously
legal. The Rangers had authority to deal with the undead – an authority that
dated back centuries – but as far as Ana knew, the doctors had only put forth
the idea as a hypothesis when she was taken.

Still, she had
bristled at George’s description of Lisenrush. She had been forced to put her
trust in the Ranger-Captain. They had seen something that was almost
unthinkable even after having witnessed it. She had expected she would get more
questions from the Port Security Service, the North East Colony’s main
intelligence agency, though they seemed satisfied with her statements. Perhaps
they were in the process of corroborating her statements with those of
Lisenrush.

Maybe there was
reason to dislike, even hate Lisenrush. But that all seemed irrelevant, given
the threats they both knew existed.

Coming back to Port
O’James had felt so strange partially because it didn’t look like the world was
ending here. Was it safe here?

“It’s like something
out of a nightmare,” Ana said to herself.

Apparently it had
been out loud, though, because George piped in. “Hey, Ana. We’re going to make
things like they were. It’ll be ok.” George, the good friend he had always
been, seemed to have adjusted to the revelation of her… physiological status
with ease.

But that wasn’t what
she was thinking about. In a strange way, it almost felt like finding out she
was undead was a kind of relief – a release of built-up pressure. It had been
shocking at first, but she was beginning to acclimate to the notion.

The nightmare was
the faceless men. The outpost had transformed almost instantaneously. How could
she be sure that the faceless men would not come back?

Lisenrush could not
feel her legs. They had her on an IV that seemed to be pumping in a lot of pain
meds. Though, she supposed, not enough to prevent her from realizing she was on
pain meds. And not enough to prevent her from feeling pain.

Maybe it would be
worse without the meds.

She had never let
pain get to her. When she was a kid – ages ago – she used to get into fights.
She was not the best student, or even the most gifted athlete. But she had an
edge in fighting, because she did not let pain bother her. She could fight
stronger kids and simply outlast them. It was a way that she could win.

Her spine had
shattered when it hit that tree. The draugr had looked so frail and thin, but
that was the thing about the undead – their strength was not human, physical
strength. It was all channeled through mysticism and magic, not earned through
practice and grit.

Through standard
medicine, she would have been confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her
life. Nothing below her abdomen would have had any function again. But all that
was changing in this new, interconnected world.

The Arizi used magic
for everything, even though the doctor that the hospital brought in insisted
that “magic” as it was understood by most people, wasn’t really magic in the
strictest sense.

She was not
interested in philosophical debates. She could barely stay awake for two hours
at a time. She suspected that was partially the boredom of being in a hospital
bed.

Sleep had been… not
difficult, but it almost didn’t feel like sleep. There was a comfort, a
pleasant sensation to sleep, when the mind’s logical thoughts were allowed to
relax and drift on a timeless sea. Yet when she slept now it just felt like
numbness.

She looked up at the
clock. It was three in the afternoon. She used the remote to turn on the
television. She looked up – she just wanted to check the news – but she had the
strangest sensation. She could hear the anchors talking about some sort of
uncharacteristic violence in Arizradna (something that gave her a certain
nationalistic smugness) but she could not see the television.

She was staring
right at the screen, but she could not tell what the picture showed. She
squeezed her eyelids shut and opened them again. Was it her vision? The draugr
had given her a painful head butt, and perhaps that had jostled her eyes or
even her brain. But she turned her head and looked at one of the medical
posters – something about proper handwashing procedures over the sink – and she
could read it just fine from across the room.

Yet when she looked
back up at the television – or rather, where she was certain the television was
– she did not see it.

And strangely, she
suddenly thought of Ana. Ana had seen things that weren’t there – faceless men,
she said. Ana said something about seeing buildings sprouting up around Far
Watch when it fell. Buildings full of these men with no faces.

What did you see there, Lydia?

She couldn’t say. She had not seen anything. Not
that she had seen the old Far Watch in ruins or an empty patch of forest. She
had simply not seen things in the places where she had looked.

And now she was not
seeing this television that was only a few feet from her eyes.

Even at Far Watch
she hadn’t felt this level of fear. She tried to think rationally why that was
as her heart began to pound and she found herself desperately trying to get out
of the bed as if her legs were not useless weight and her spine was not
shattered into a million shards of bone.

Ana saw them. She thought. Ana
saw them. Maybe Ana can stop them.

And then she could
see the screen. There were pictures of what looked like a satellite telescope
that had fallen onto a building. She could see the television with ease, its
power button and volume controls, the cord reaching from the back to a plug
nearby in the wall. It was perfectly ordinary.

Friday, January 27, 2017

Gravity
seemed to have become a weak thing, only a suggestion, rather than an incontrovertible law. His body was still and immaterial. Instead, he found
himself focusing on a little spider web in the upper corner of the room. The
spider walked carefully over her little construction project. A proud
homeowner, that little bug. She took such fastidious care, creating her little
spiral.

“Do
you understand the charges as I have described them?”

He
nodded. It was odd to think of this as a case of crime and law enforcement. He
had never thought of himself a criminal. He was a soldier. Or no, that wasn’t
it.

He
was an Agent of the House, nothing more.

It
was surprisingly civil. He supposed he had Nascine and Tartin to thank for
that. They were thieves, a profession that still held with it some degree of
gentility. Not every facet of the Rookery was so kind. In a way, he was lucky.
Rather than being tossed into some dark room and left to starve and go mad, he
was instead in a room lit with bright fluorescents with an enforcement officer
taking him through the necessary bureaucracies.

Of
course now he had to consider what the House would do. An Agent inside the
Rookery? That had surely been useful, but he wondered how useful it would be to
have an Agent inside a national prison, not to mention one who already exposed
as an Agent.

The
ramifications were vast. The House had been reduced to a conspiracy theory
within the mind of the general public. The various intelligence services did a
decent job of playing their cards close to the chest, but he suspected most of
them had been in accord. While some clearly had an idea, he had to guess that
among the “minor leagues” like Arkos Province’s Covert Intelligence Office and
the North East Colony’s quaintly named Port Security Service, belief in the
House might get you transferred to a basement office with nothing but file
boxes and disused computer equipment to keep you company.

And
there he was, living proof that it was all real. His capture had been far too
public, too ostentatious, and far too many people had been involved. Some might
still not believe, but anyone who knew the game would have figured it out. He
would go down in history as one of the House’s biggest failures. And the House
wasn’t supposed to have a history.

Things
would probably end with a shiv to the back. He did not want to imagine the
sensation, but he had to remind himself that such a thing was not only possible,
but probable.

His
hair had gotten long – he hadn’t had a cut since Narcia – and so he swept it
back from his forehead.

“Sir?”
said the officer. “Time to go.”

Sir. That was odd. A strangely polite
way to refer to an Agent of the House. Maybe it was just a standard sort of
thing. A civilized country with a civilized system to make sure everyone felt
right and properly civilized.

In
the absence of a given name (Four Eyes had learned years ago to really think of
himself truly as Four Eyes and allow the name his parents had given him to
recede back into his portfolio of aliases) they were using the false one that
he had used in Narcia. James Tarson. It was better than John Doe, at least. He
wouldn’t mind using this name for now. If he was terribly lucky and managed to
escape, he might ditch the name and take up something else and retire to some
island in the Sagrean Sea.

Chris
Thatch was a burned bridge. He had stolen that name from a dead man, but now
that the man had been discovered, it had been restored. Chris Thatch would be
buried in a cemetery rather than Murleg’s Bog. “James Tarson” bore him no ill
will. Perhaps putting a spirit to rest, if that is what one accomplishes with
burial rites, could even be seen a small consolation in all of this.

The
truth of the matter is that as an Agent of the House, he had great respect for
the Rookery and the institutions of Retrein, as well as Narcia. In his mind,
the House did not count the people or governments of the world as adversaries.
They were assets to be carefully managed. He had dropped the Retron accent,
though the voice he spoke with now was not the one he remembered having before
he had been given this assignment. It had lost its regionalism from the small, coastal
town in northeastern Narcia where he had grown up, with its wharf and driftwood
shacks all with peeling paint. Now his voice had flattened into a general
Narcian dialect that had kind of melted into the Arizi one to become the least
distinctive in the world.

If
this change to his voice was intentional, it could only be subconsciously so,
but it did suit his purposes.

And what are those?

He
brushed this thought aside.

He
would be questioned, but he doubted he would be tortured. The Retrons were
regressive in myriad ways but even the shadiest parts of the Rookery had ceded their
worst brutalities to the more attractive virtue of result. Six Coins had told
him that the Other Side sometimes dabbled in it, though Sir Roderick Candel
(they had long ago dispensed with the pretense of anonymity) was prone to exaggerate
the deficiencies of his adversaries.

But
with a couple of honorable thieves like Tartin and Nascine taking charge of
this case, Tarson took some consolation that his treatment would be practical
and dispassionate. Certainly he would be questioned. They would offer him deals
and Tarson knew that he would have to work hard not to betray the House. But
until this sabotage, he had been an exemplary Agent. He was confident in his
skills. He could very well be ejected from the House roster, such as it was,
but he would not betray them. That would be foolish and invite a bullet to the
back of the head, but oddly, Tarson felt that this was not his primary
motivation. The truth of the matter was that he was proud of his work. The
House was the thing. It was the single greatest endeavor in the history of the
world. When the shock of his discovery had worn off, he was sure that he would
mourn his fall from grace, but if called for, he would give his life for the
House.

Tarson
was led to the car. His driver, a man in his late 30s, he guessed, was wearing
a charcoal suit. The driver glanced at the man who would be riding shotgun, who
seemed a bit younger. The glance looked nervous.

Yes, you lucky guys get to transport the big
bad House Agent.

The
submachine gun made a visible bulge in the second man’s jacket. It was some
comfort to know that this gun was probably meant to protect Tarson, rather than
kill him, at least as long as he didn’t try to run.

The
car was unmarked, though anyone looking closely would be able to guess that the
black vehicle was enforcement. But then, most people didn’t.

So
much of his craft was based on the idea that people generally didn’t think much
of what they saw. In another life, it seemed, he had simply put on a jumpsuit –
not with any patches or labels or anything, just a dark blue jumpsuit, taken a
ladder and gone up and removed the fuses from a traffic light in Entraht. No
one stopped him. The drivers simply adjusted to the malfunctioning municipal
equipment. He hadn’t even been sure that the House needed to slow traffic in
that intersection. He suspected Six Coins had just wanted to demonstrate a
principle, as this was very early in Four Eyes’ service.

Had
Tarson been looking at the newspaper on the stand next to where their car had
stopped rather than the rather attractive, somewhat androgynous woman selling
coffee from the stand, he would have seen the following headline:

What
he did notice, however, was that the identical black car in front of them turned
right. The car that he was in turned left and then the identical black car
behind them turned right.

He
watched the other cars disappear around a corner. Perhaps this was not so
surprising. Transporting a House Agent, the Rookery surely would expect someone
to be watching. Putting him in the middle car was sort of the obvious choice,
but he had to go somewhere. He was unaware of who would be watching him –
probably no one he had ever met – but he was certain someone was, or at least
was trying to do so.

He
wondered if he would ever be in the loop again. Probably not. Not much use for
a captured spy after all, at least not much use for his friends. The Rookery
would treat him like he was worth his weight in gold. There was something
vaguely delightful about that, though again that was perhaps just a
consolation.

His
downfall had been engineered. He was certain now that the message: “there’s a
hole dug up in Murleg’s Bog” had been sent not by an ally but by an enemy. They
had discovered the location of Thatch’s body and relocated it in a place where…

How
could they have known that Tartin and Nascine would be there?

The
world was a strange place, with magic, gods, and demons walking the land. But
ultimately, even the most powerful beings were just individuals, making their
way in a universe that cared only that everyone follow physical laws – whether
they be mundane or arcane. Tarson did not believe in fate, and he did not
believe that some greater force had put Tartin and Nascine in that house to punish
him for his sins.

Thus
he believed there to be two possibilities:

The
first was dumb luck. Coincidences happen, and on a long enough timeline, every
possible scenario will eventually occur. But that was not satisfying. Tartin
and Nascine had come there independently, so that made it even more unlikely.

The
second possibility was that their arrival, just like his own, had been
choreographed by his enemy. Every trick, every miraculous feat of coordination
between anonymous parties that the House was known for - the enemy would be
capable of that as well.

What
troubled him was that if they had been able to pull this off against him, they
were clearly winning.

They
were taking a tunnel south. The R4, it looked like. Tarson admonished himself
for letting his attention drop. The tunnel was brightly lit with electric
light, taking them south through the tall hills at the edge of Ravenfort.

Tarson’s
hands were cuffed to a faux-leather loop in the back of the car. The loop was
attached by a chain to the frame of the car.

Hope we don’t get into an accident, Tarson
thought, bitterly.

They
emerged from the tunnel into a torrent of rain. They were traveling at highway
speeds now, and the windshield wipers beat back and forth, their metronomic
rhythm providing accompaniment to the rain.

They
hadn’t told Tarson which prison he would be staying in, but he suspected it
would be Hexley, a small, secure facility that specialized in keeping
magically-capable prisoners. Aside from a handful of tricks, he didn’t really
consider himself an arcanist, but Tarson supposed it would be the most secure
facility.

And
they may have been thinking about keeping people out just as much as they were
thinking of keeping him in.

He
had driven this road countless times, but there was something profoundly
different about driving down a road versus riding in the back seat with ones
hands cuffed to a faux-leather loop.

It
would be hours until they got there, but Tarson resolved not to fall asleep. He
would sleep once he was in his cell, where there was relative safety.

After
an hour, the driver exited the highway, turning down Hemwick Road, which led
into a dense forest and presumably to a place called Hemwick, which Tarson had
never heard of.

“Where
are you going, Chambers?” asked the man riding shotgun.

“We’re
transferring the prisoner to another vehicle outside of Hemwick.”

“I
wasn’t briefed on a vehicle transfer.”

“It
was need-to-know. Consider this your briefing, Rykes.”

Tarson’s
heart began to pound. Chambers was selling it decently, perhaps enough to fool
a glorified cop, But Tarson could see the subtle signs of nervousness, of
deception. There was a slight quiver to the man’s eyebrow, and his hand was
gripping the steering wheel just a little to tight. Something was about to go down.

He
could say something, but how likely was it that Rykes would believe him?

And if you don’t tell him, you’re going to
get murdered in the woods.

“The
driver is planning to kill us,” said Tarson.

Almost
instantly, Rykes turned back to him. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Listen,
Rykes, is it? I can tell when someone is lying. The reason you weren’t briefed
on this is because it’s not part of the plan.”

Now
he turned around, and Tarson’s face exploded in pain as Ryke’s heavy fist
connected with it.

Oh fuck you man, I was trying to save your
life, Tarson bitterly thought to himself. Though to be fair, Ryke’s
survival was secondary to his own. Tarson decided it was time to come up with
an idea, and soon.

But
they had only been on this road for minutes when they pulled onto an unpaved
forest path. This was it. This was where they were going to do it.

He
thought about how he could use the cuffs. Maybe he could get them around a
neck? If he could get the submachine gun, that would be ideal. He tried to
decide if Chambers looked like the type to hesitate. He wouldn’t gloat – he was
far too nervous to gloat and frankly, most people preferred to get over with
this sort of thing as quickly as they could, but sometimes they would hesitate
if they weren’t sure they were up to it. Tarson prayed that Chambers was the
sort of person that pulled an adhesive bandage off slowly and gradually. If he
was quick and efficient it would make escape practically impossible.

They
came to a stop.

The
road had come to an end in front of a tiny barn made of corrugated steel. There
was another car there, a grey sedan. There were three men standing next to it.
Two were in black masks to match the rest of their clothes, openly carrying
submachine guns. The third was a very tall man who was mostly bald and
bespectacled, wearing a grey suit and smoking what looked like a blackroot
cigarette.

“Ok,
let me talk to him,” said Chambers.

The
driver got out of the car and walked up to the man smoking the cigarette.
Tarson could only just hear what they were saying.

“Ok,
I have him.”

“I
can see that.”

“Where’s
Anne?”

The
man took a drag. “Outside Damana.”

“Damana?”

“Yes.”

“That’s
across the ocean.”

“She
is there.”

“Ok,
whatever. You’ll let her go now?”

“We
need to confirm it’s him.”

Rykes
had heard it too, and in an act of self-destructive anger, he was already
pulling out his gun. Tarson cringed as he waited for the men in the black masks
to open fire tearing the car and their bodies apart. “Chambers you piece of-“

There
was a thunderous bang and the sound of shattering glass as the passenger window
imploded and Rykes’s blood sprayed across the front seat of the car. There was
a fourth man, also in a black mask, standing there with a pistol.

“Fuck!”
yelled Chambers.

The
man who had shot Rykes shaded his eyes and looked in the rear window at Taron. “Confirmed,
it’s him,” said the man.

Tarson
was so transfixed by Rykes’ blood gushing out of the exit wound in his head
that he nearly had a heart attack when he heard the second shot. Now he looked
up and saw Chambers’ lifeless body collapsing out of view.

How’s that plan coming, Four Eyes? asked
his own cruelly sarcastic voice in his head.

The
rear door on the driver’s side opened and a fifth man leaned over, brandishing
a combat knife.

Tarson
pulled away, squirming, his mind howling with animal terror. The knife sliced
through the faux-leather loop and he popped free. He wriggled over onto the
front seat and thrust himself out through the still-open car door. He hit the
muddy ground on his back and attempted to roll himself into a position where he
could stand.

Out
of the corner of his eye, he could see Chambers’ dead eyes staring at him. A
white-hot streak of panic shot through his consciousness. He got one knee under
himself and pushed up.

Only
for everything to go dark.

For
a moment he thought he was dead, but then he found that a membrane of thick
cloth was entering his mouth each time he breathed in. He felt strong arms wrap
around him, but he fought back, elbowing someone in what he imagined was the
gut.

He
tried to run, but then one of those strong arms pulled him down. He landed on
his back, and the arms started to pull him by the wrists. His shoulders
screamed in agony as he was dragged like an animal going to the slaughterhouse,
his clothes totally soaked in mud and his breathing inhibited by the thick
cloth of the bag they had put over his head.

Wet
mud gave way to dry, cold and rough cement, and the faint light that made it
through the bag was now gone. His pants were caught on the surface of the
floor, and soon they were down around his ankles. The cement gave way to
something smooth, like linoleum.

Then,
the ground moved down. An elevator.

And
then the sound of rain outside disappeared. They dragged him along smoother
concrete and then they dropped him.

He
heard their footsteps receding and then he could not hear them anymore.

Around
him, there was only darkness. And there was silence like he had never heard
before.

Friday, December 9, 2016

Boss
Man didn’t bother watching the car leave, taking Freya back to Kapla Furnace Village. There was risk in this action, but he
was no stranger to risk. But he needed forward momentum. This was a revolution,
albeit a secret one against an organization most people didn’t think existed.

His
circumstances were not ideal, but they were necessary. They would leave the
desert eventually, but he had only just started to plant his seeds. They might
not bear fruit for some time.

The
camp was oddly friendly, the people oddly warm. He had not intended that, and
in fact it made him suspicious. Still, he would adapt. That was the key. The
House planned. It planned extraordinarily well. But he adapted, and up until
this point, it had kept him alive and free.

Chaffi
was an early recruit. When Boss Man had been in the House, he was high enough
to understand that they had not had much luck recruiting among the djinn. Boss
Man knew of Mr. Flow, but he was a rarity – a djinni who preferred living among
the “jengu.”

He
had given the House’s pitch many times before, but with Chaffi, he had favored
a different approach. He told him a story. The story of Boss Man. A man whose
real name was Jac Epping.

The
camp they were in was really within the borders of Arizradna – even though the
cities and towns didn’t reach this far into the desert, the borders of the
world’s oldest country encompassed them. That was by design, actually, to take
advantage of the defensive magic that kept the Arizi from needing a real
military.

But
if you went a couple thousand miles east, you’d get into the Grimelands. Great
metal structures rose from the ground as if they had grown from seeds, and the
air was full of dust and smoke. In the Grimelands, if you spent much time near
these structures, you’d start to get an oily residue on your skin. People
avoided it, but a place that people avoid becomes very attractive to someone
who wants to avoid people. Over centuries, the Grimelands became something of a
country in and of itself, though no one could tell you where the capital was or
who was in charge. And it was there that Jac Epping was born.

He
hadn’t really known his father. Ky Epping worked for the Imperial Rail Company,
shoveling coal because back in the Grimelands, they still used that. IRC was a
relic from a far earlier era, and its tracks were the skeletal remains of the
Red Empire that had died centuries ago.

Ky
had been up at the engine when bandits blew the track. Forty men, women, and
children died, including Jac’s father. It was barely considered news.

So
Jac and his mother Hope moved to a town called Bitter. She had been harsh and
drank a lot, but she also made sure he learned his letters and math. She wanted
good things for him, even if she was a difficult woman to live with.

Jac
helped on the Namrys’ farm to supplement the family income. The IRC barely gave
Hope any compensation for Ky’s death, and they cheated her out of his pension.

He
was just a couple days from turning twelve when the Folstom Brothers came
calling on Hope Epping. Jac was too young to understand what they wanted from
her, though he suspected later it might have been something about debts.

When
Vin Folstom suggested that she could pay those debts through alternative means,
she declined with vigor. Unfortunately, Vin had little compunction about taking
with force that which he could not procure through other means.

It
was unfortunate for Vin because he had ignored the hand-cannon Hope Epping had
in her kitchen, and when he made his advance, he was left with a fist-sized
hole in his chest. It was unfortunate for Hope Gepper because there was more
than one Folstom, and when Sal saw what she had made of Vin, murder filled his
heart, and this time she was not quick enough on the draw. Jac Epping was
orphaned.

And
he knew that this was what had happened because he had seen it. When the
Folstoms came, his mother had instructed him to hide beneath the floorboards.

He
left Bitter and made his way to Smokestack, taking up his own job with the IRC.
However, thanks to his mother’s lessons, he was able to get a better job at a
desk, working out timetables and keeping the ledgers.

It
was during this time that a man Jac would only ever know as “Sootgrin” came to
talk to him about scheduling. Sootgrin – a name Jac would never understand,
given the man’s pearly whites – told him to change the schedule of two trains,
ensuring that one coming into Smokestack would leave before the other arrived.

At
the time, Jac assumed that Sootgrin was an important person at the company. He
had seen him on occasion, and he believed that Sootgrin matched the description
of the company president – an older man, tall and thin with long white hair and
a long white mustache.

Jac
figured out a way to change the schedules of the trains without upsetting all
the other schedules and eagerly made it to impress this Sootgrin. It was only
after he had submitted the new schedules that Sootgrin informed him that he did
not, in fact, work for the company. And if Jac didn’t want his bosses finding
out what he had done, he would have to do more tasks for Sootgrin.

Jac
was only thirteen at the time. He naturally did what Sootgrin told him to do.
But Sootgrin did not simply make demands. He also instructed Jac. He taught Jac
to forge a signature. He taught him how to lie convincingly. In spite of the
fact that he was being blackmailed, Jac came to like the old man. In fact, it
no longer felt like he was being blackmailed. Sootgrin started to feel like a
grandfather.

When
Jac turned sixteen, Sootgrin gave the pitch. He was an Agent of the House. And
regardless of the House’s agenda for trains in the Grimelands, Sootgrin’s main
task was the training of a new recruit. In effect, he had already been a House
Agent for three years, but now Sootgrin felt it was time to make it official.
Jac got the codename Mr. Key.

And
for a time, life was pretty similar. Then, one day, Sootgrin abruptly announced
that it was time to quit. The House was no longer interested in trains, or at
least these particular trains that came out of Smokestack. So they left and
traveled east to Gessan Province in the Redlands.

Jac’s
work for the House got more interesting, but also more dangerous. He remembered
in particular a time when he and Sootgrin had assisted in a bank robbery. They
weren’t there at the time of course – the House preferred to keep its Agents
somewhat removed from such overt acts. Still, they provided logistical support.
They put the gang in touch with a safecracker and taught the robbers about the
way that the bank’s security cameras could be bypassed. Then, when the day
came, Mr. Key found out that the robbery had turned into a bloodbath, and that
the robbers were all dead.

To
Jac’s shock, Sootgrin did not seem shocked at all. He indicated that this had,
in fact, been the intended outcome of the robbery. Jac demanded to know what
the purpose of such a thing was, but Sootgrin managed to explain it without
explaining it in such a way that it was not until years later that Jac would
think to question what they had done again. Essentially, Sootgrin reasoned, the
House knew what it was doing. Did he know the specifics? No. But the House always
thought thirty steps ahead. They had reasons, and Sootgrin had faith that they
were good ones.

Jac
became more comfortable with their activities over time. His protests died down
and he began to simply do his job. And apparently he and Sootgrin were showing
a level of competence that was rare even within the House, because before too
long, Jac found himself traveling the world, participating in delicate and
important operations. He saw the installation of a House Agent to the Arizradna
High Council. He helped to thwart a potentially disastrous Vistani invasion of
the Wastes by leaking their invasion plans. He had the son of a general in
Sarso committed to a mental institution, despite the fact that the young man
was perfectly sane.

The
House was built on compartmentalization, and so it was difficult to trace its
actions to motivations and causes. But as Mr. Key became more prominent within
the organization, the silhouette of its larger form had begun to reveal itself
to him. The chains – wholly separate and distinct at the House’s lowest levels,
became tangled and interconnected the closer one got to the top. And looking down
some of the chains that led back to the Grimelands, he made a fateful
discovery.

Sal
and Vin Folstom were both House Agents.

Jac
thought it had to be a coincidence, and that their actions were probably not
much more complicated than they had seemed. Though Mr. Key had become an
exemplary Agent, the House was not devoid of ineffective brutes at its lower
levels.

When
he approached Sootgrin with what he had discovered, however, he did not get the
reaction that he expected. It was not surprise. It was not skepticism. It was
not even worry that Jac had been looking in places he shouldn’t have been
looking.

No,
it was guilt.

Sootgrin
was a talented liar. But Sootgrin was also the person who had taught Mr. Key
how to lie, and also how to recognize one. The more he attempted to deny it,
the more he attempted to divert the conversation, the harder Jac pressed, until
finally, Sootgrin confessed.

The
House had sent the Folstom Brothers there. The Folstom Brothers had killed
Jac’s mother on orders. And it was because of Jac. They had seen in Jac the
potential to be a remarkable Agent. A potential, Sootgrin informed him, that
Jac was fulfilling – exceeding every expectation. The House sought to create
the ideal environment in which Jac could be recruited.

All
this, when Jac was not yet even twelve.

He
let Sootgrin live, though he felt now that that had been a mistake. But he cast
off his allegiance to the House. He saw now just how deep its callous cruelty
ran. Jac had his own subordinates, but he knew to be careful around them. The
House had a practice called “Breaking the Chain,” in which an unsatisfactory
Agent might be cut off from the House in varyingly severe manners. If an Agent
was cut off, their subordinates might share their fate, but alternatively, the
higher-ups might instead have one of those subordinates eliminate the Agent in
question and take their place.

In
Jac’s case, it was a woman he had recruited designated “Sieve.” After leaving
Sootgrin, he quickly called up his immediate subordinates (he was a prominent
enough Agent that each of his subordinates had their own, and some of them had
their own as well.) When he arrived in the basement of an Omlos grocery store
to speak with them, he found that two of the five were on the ground with their
throats slit, and a third, Sieve, was there with a bloody knife.

He
discovered Sieve’s presence when her knife slashed him along the face. They
fought, but in the end he prevailed, leaving the knife embedded in her chest.

He
decided at that point that Omlos, and indeed all of Narcia, was no longer a
safe place for him. So he smuggled himself out of the country on an airship
bound for Damana. Then he traveled back to his homeland where he would begin to
recruit this small force he had managed to put together. And in time, if things
went well, he would destroy the House.

Mr.
Key had learned a great deal while under the House’s employ. He did not condone
their ethics, but he could not deny the effectiveness of their methods. And so,
Mr. Key became Boss Man, and he began recruiting his own Agents. But his Agents
would get to know the story of Jac Epping. He would ensure that they understood
the stakes of what they were doing here.

But
Boss Man had a secret. It was a secret he could not tell anyone, and in fact he
tried not to avoid thinking about it himself. Compartmentalization was crucial
in the world of cloak and dagger. It was a challenge, though not impossible, to
do so within his own mind.

The
secret?

There
never was a man named Jac Epping. There was never an Agent called Sootgrin.
There was never an Agent named Mr. Key. And Boss Man had never set foot in the
Grimelands before the previous summer.

Boss
Man had his reasons for doing what he was doing, but for now, he would keep
them to himself.

Welcome to Dispatches from Otherworld

This blog contains multiple narratives, all set in the fictional universe known as Otherworld. Each narrative is made up of many chapters, telling the continuous story of its characters. They are all somewhat related, but can be read separately if you so choose. If you want to begin at the beginning, start with "The Lower Block," which was posted in February of 2012.